Track Listing

1. You Can Dance Your Rock 'N' Roll
2. Meet Me At The Jailhouse
3. Jolly Cup Of Tea
4. Buffalo Station Get On Down To Memphis
5. Gotta Crush (About You)
6. Wear A Fast Gun
7. Ball Park Incident
8. Carlsberg Special
9. See My Baby Jive
10. Bend Over Beethoven
11. Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)
12. You Got The Jump On Me
13. Rob Roy's Nightmare (A Bit More HA)
14. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23954 in Music
• Released on: 2006-11-27
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Not Normal
I bought this LP when it first came out and was a bit taken aback by it. Now I have it in digital format and it remains one of the very few rock albums that I can play over and over. It has excellent musicianship from start to finish for starters. But something not quite right is going on, the Wizzard, Mr Wood has taken rock'n'roll and rock in particular and done something unnatural to them. Nothing is quite as you expect it, from the driving beats that suddenly get replaced by a bit of cello or sax to the bizarre WWI marching song 'Jolly Cup of Tea'. Brontosaurus beats arrive and depart to allow boogie-woogie its place in the sun.
It's an amazing piece of work that would probably have been more popular with the rock and prog-rock mob if they had been able to see past the Top of the Pops performances of Wizzard's singles and their own pomposity. They didn't though and it was their loss.
Brew has weak points though. The production is patchy with tracks sounding like they were spliced together from different sessions (this is a bit of a Roy Wood weakness because he uses so many different instruments). The lyrics aren't always up to scratch either (you'll sing them anyway, but cringe as you do). But somehow you can forgive all this just to hear a very unusual album that blends rock, prog-rock, boogie-woogie, ballad, jazz and er, Oh what a lovely war.

I Love This Album!
Always loved this.

1. Terrific songs.
2. It is so weird! Instruments appear and disappear. Hanging around just to play a few notes or perform a quick solo.
3. So much going on in every track, it NEVER gets boring.
4. The mix is so murky and dense. Sounds like 20 or so people are all in the same room playing at the same time!
5. Roy really gives it some when he is singing, he SCREAMS them out.
6. Its bloody good.
7. Loads of top bonus tracks on this.

BUY, BUY, BUY!!!!

Fresh and daring....Wizzard Brew
I clearly remember reading the shock headline in 1972: 'ROY WOOD QUITS ELO'! As a major fan, I was devastated. What would his next 'move' (ha ha) be, I wondered? A few months later, the first Wizzard 45, 'Ball Park Incident', appeared, reminding me of The Move at their most raucous. In retrospect it was a taster of things to come...six album tracks making optimum use of a large and diverse line-up, and no limits when it came to musical policy (jazz, marching band, 50s Rock n' Roll, it was all fair game).

This album seems to pick up from where the 'heavier' Move of 1969-70 left off, which is just fine by me. 'Wizzard Brew' was far more about dense workouts than the Spectoresque feel of those brilliant hit singles. "Meet Me At The Jailhouse', for example, runs for 13 minutes, and will either make your spine tingle, or leave you reeling in shock ! Grinding cellos, Roy's amazing, Hendrixy lead guitar and banks of saxophones, sometimes pushed though a synthesizer...brilliant, weird and totally awsome. However, if you think you might prefer the relative sanity of the hit singles, they've now been added to the album, so you can't possibly lose.

This has always been one of my favourite Roy Wood albums, sounding as fresh and daring today as it did over thirty years ago.